Outsource Your Bitcoin Mining To HashPlex, Which Just Raised A Seed Round

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Are too many Bitcoin mining rigs making your office or home unspeakably hot or noisy?

You can just outsource it to someone else.

Or at least that’s the premise behind HashPlex, a cryptocurrency-miner hosting company that just raised $400,000 from investors including SecondMarket co-founder Barry Silbert’s Bitcoin Opportunity Corp. and Facebook engineer Jason Prado.

Basically, you just ship your hardware to HashPlex, which is based in Seattle, specify what mining software you want to use, and they say they’ll take care of the rest for anywhere from $89 per Kilowatt used constantly over the course of a month to more expensive, custom levels of service.

A very loose analogy would be AWS (Amazon Web Services) for Bitcoin mining.

In the Bitcoin world, some people like to buy the crypto-currency outright on exchanges like Bitstamp.

But others “mine” it. In the original Bitcoin paper, there’s this process by which a fixed and predictable amount of Bitcoin is released at different intervals of time. Bitcoin miners solve complex, crypotographic math problems in order to both compete for this Bitcoin and keep up the public record of Bitcoin transactions that have taken place. As Bitcoin has become more valuable, it’s become more resource and energy intensive to “mine” coins and hardware makers roll out more sophisticated and dedicated mining rigs every year.

“Right now, people sort of do it in their basement or their mom’s basement, but we can build out a facility that irons out the frills,” said co-founder Bernie Rihn.

Rihn worked in thermal design at Apple, while his co-founder George Schnurle is a mechanical engineer who trained at Stanford.

They’re using the money to build out their very first so-called “HashCenter” in Central Washington. If you calculate out their rates, Rihn says it works out to be something like $99 per month for a KNC Miner Jupiter to $297 per month for a Butterfly Labs Mini-Rig. You can check out more specific pricing here.

There are competitors like CloudHashing, where you can pay something like $299 for 40 Gigahash a second in mining power. But Rihn says those costs work out to be around ten times the amount you would have to pay if were to buy your own hardware.